(Although, I'd never even heard of a stem and leaf plot until I taught it for the first time, and I'm still non-the-wiser on when they'd be used. They do make it easier to find the mode and median values when working by hand.)

I appreciate you could teach both, but I'm still thinking that leaf diagrams are a bit of a waste of time, and given that time is limited it would be better spent on learning how to get Excel to do the hard work for you. (With appropriate theory taught first of course, not just plugging the numbers in and getting the answer!)

I appreciate you could teach both, but I'm still thinking that leaf diagrams are a bit of a waste of time, and given that time is limited it would be better spent on learning how to get Excel to do the hard work for you.

Same argument as "Why teach kids to multiply or divide when in reality they'll just use a calculator."

Mrs just told me about leaf diagrams I never did don't remember doing them at GCSE/A level.

Back to an earlier point maths is supposed to involve accepted standards so everyone* knows what you are talking about, hence precedence and naming numbers correctly. twentysix hundred should be fairly easy for most to figure out but threesixty, seventwenty and teneighty, which I'm sure most of the people here could guess at, may not mean a lot to a doddery old maths teacher.

Back to an earlier point maths is supposed to involve accepted standards so everyone* knows what you are talking about, hence precedence and naming numbers correctly. twentysix hundred should be fairly easy for most to figure out but threesixty, seventwenty and teneighty, which I'm sure most of the people here could guess at, may not mean a lot to a doddery old maths teacher.

I think you're mixing up two concepts - mathematical rules (BODMAS and the like), and mathematical culture (how you talk about maths). The first is universal, the second quite clearly isn't, with some variation even within a country.

Do schools give out to parents the syllabus or teaching material? As has been said, it's all about context, that needs to be conveyed to the parents. It strikes me that when our little girl goes to school there'll be a whole lot of re-learning to be done!

Just googled that as I've never come across it before. Unless I'm misunderstanding what I'm seeing, it's just long multiplication, only with more writing. I guess how I can see how it might simplify multiplication but at the expense of both brevity and comprehension.

That is to say, you can see the logic in long multiplication fairly readily, you're multiplying by each digit in turn, adjusting for units, and adding them all up. Lattice multiplication looks like a magic trick.

So "How many tenths of 1.5 are there in 1.5?" means "How many 0.15 are there in 1.5"

And guess what, there are 10 0.15s in 1.5. So the answer is 10. The given answer.

They are testing you know what a tenth, or an eighth or a fith is. The important bit of the question is the "how many tenths" bit. The rest of the question is irelevant, it could be 1.5 or cake or horses or overweight mountain bikers, it doesn't matter, if you split something into tenths there will always be 10 bits.

You are confusing yourself with your ability to work out what 1 tenth of 1.5 is (and one tenth of 1 if you want to answer 15).

They're not. It's almost certainly a place value question, so they want to know students can identify which digit represent the tenths. There are two digits, the first shows how many units, the second how many tenths.

You really think that, at KS2, ie primary school level, ie 7-11 year olds, a valid and sensible way of testing whether a pupil knows how many tenths there are in a whole $something is to phrase the question as "how many tenths are there in 1.5?" and to expect the answer "10"?

I think you're mixing up two concepts - mathematical rules (BODMAS and the like), and mathematical culture (how you talk about maths)

possibly, tho I do wonder if "twelve hundred" is an Americanism, "three sixty" I'm pretty sure is slang, but yeah I could be talking cobblers.

unless you're French

hmm 21=twenty and one, yeah different countries do numbers differently, fair enough, but surely there is still a national standard? would a French maths teacher kick off if you said "une mille neuf cent neuf dix et une" ? Coz if my 20 odd year old cmel French is right both are 1991 it's just that yours is correct and mine is merely describing the number. Kinda like 1,200 and twelve hundred.

are we sure, is this thread second or third hand, what was the exact wording of the question, what was the answer and was it on the same test as the 868 question? seems weird that they would have a place value question followed by a dubiously simplistic question like that.

would a French maths teacher kick off if you said "une mille neuf cent neuf dix et une" ?

Actually.. mille neuf cent quatre-vingt onze sounds right so maybe you can do both.

In Welsh incidentally there's a traditional vigesimal (20 based, sort of like the French) counting system but they've introduced a decimal system where 13 is un deg tri (one ten three) and 37 is tri deg saith, and it's strict without any irregularities. Must make teaching hundreds tens and units nice and easy